All posts tagged Buzzfeed

BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti Bloomberg Comcast Corp.’s NBCUniversal is in advanced talks to make a significant minority investment in BuzzFeed, as the media giant hunts for ways to reach young audiences, according to people familiar with the situation. The terms being discussed would involve a roughly $250 million investment by NBCUniversal in BuzzFeed, a hot [...] Read More »

Publishers are ready to ramp up content distribution on Facebook’s Instant Articles in the coming days, people familiar with the matter said, with some newsrooms preparing to post more than 30 stories a day. News organization including the New York Times and the Atlantic are prepared to start publishing as early as tomorrow, but are waiting for when Facebook is ready, the people said. Read More »

Two U.S. media outlets, tech magazine Wired and website BuzzFeed, have launched German editions recently in an attempt to shake up a market that is dominated by traditional publishers.

Wired started selling a German edition at kiosks last month and has also a German website with articles about technology, science and innovation. Most stories are written by its 19 journalists in Germany, with only a few translated from the U.S. edition.

The BuzzFeed website offers a mixture of German- and English-language stories. The entertainment and news items are optimized for being shared on social networks such as Facebook, similar to the website’s original version. Read More »

Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz is investing $50 million in BuzzFeed, a New York-based viral content company that has been at the forefront of shifting trends in media consumption.

The profitable company, which started in 2006, grew quickly with its focus on lightweight, easily shareable content like lists, Internet memes and funny photos. More recently it has put resources into more traditional news coverage. Read More »

Jonah Peretti presents at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in New York.

Buzzfeed, a website filled simultaneously with in-depth stories on politics and tech and lists of cute animals, has grown to become one of the largest properties on the Web.

How did it get there? Basically, because the site acknowledges that a person’s online presence can’t really be identified or distilled into a single “personality” — and what a person views depends on where they are in the Web.

And Buzzfeed has content for all of those different flavors of a person’s personality, CEO Jonah Peretti said today at TechCrunch’s Disrupt conference in New York.

“It’s comforting to think we’re these unified, predictable people, but when you look at it… it’s sometimes a little unsettling,” he said. “But I think you should be happy that you have this conflicted nature. At Buzzfeed, it’s part of our strategy.”

“EQ matters more than IQ,” he said. “Being smart matters much less on the social web, then having a heart and having a sense of human behavior.”

Basically, people search Google for different kinds of content than the kinds of things they share on Facebook with their friends. Sometimes it gets even a little more…racy on Google.

After BuzzFeed’s announcement of a new $19 million round of venture funding yesterday, we had a chat with Jonah Peretti, the company’s co-founder. He was pretty tight-lipped about the numbers – what the company is worth, or how much revenue it’s pulling in – and much of what he said about how the company works has already been covered in depth elsewhere. But one thing stuck out that we thought was worth talking about here.

BuzzFeed gets a lot of coverage for its position as the trendiest of media companies, a kind of shorthand for everything that people think works on the internet these days. Viral, social, web native, etc etc.

But what gets overlooked in much of this analysis is that the company is notably old-school in one significant way: it’s a people-heavy business — loaded with technology, to be sure — whose fundamental approach to making money is based on hiring human beings, from creative talent to account managers. In a lot of ways, the company is more 1960s Madison Avenue than 2010s Silicon Valley.

That’s because it makes all its money from so-called social advertising — essentially web content produced on behalf of a sponsor to fit its message — rather than text or banner ads. All of BuzzFeed’s advertisers work with it in a way similar to traditional advertisers and their agencies, dealing with a creative at BuzzFeed to design ads that will both go viral and quietly drill its brand into the minds of viewers.